Search results for ""Author Various"

Handwriting Today is a comprehensive cursive handwriting programme. It removes the need for teaching a pre cursive letter formation, as it introduces individual letters at Book A level, that have the identical shape and form of those used at later stages when joining letters and creating words. It starts with a cursive font and builds to joins and words quickly. It uses a flowing cursive font that combines the best of traditional and contemporary fonts to create an easy to write and easy on the eye writing style. Pupils find this an easy beginning. It focuses on the flow of letters and text, and avoids a start-stop writing style, which in turn leads to illegible writing in later years a smooth flowing style is the result of using Handwriting Today. It makes it easy for young children to build their skills, as in the early stages all lower case letters share the same starting point. Handwriting Today is available from Book A to Book D: Book A: letters are introduced in Book A, where young writers practice word shapes and formations before moving to joins in the following year; Book B: looks at creating joins and practicing various letter combinations leading to the writing of words; Book C: builds on joins, combining multiple joins into words, groups of words and sentences; and, Book D: provides opportunities for children to practice their writing in the context of every day usage and cross-curricular themes, providing for letter and join revision as appropriate. What will the teacher get with Handwriting Today? It contains over 72 activity pages in each level. It provides regular revision and consolidation. It offers teacher assessment framework. It features programme that provide a developmental approach to handwriting. It includes diversity of resources that allow for individual attention to pupil progress and a comprehensive approach to differentiation of the class handwriting programme. It is a comprehensive, photocopiable teacher's guide. It also offers a demonstration that can be download. It also provides handwriting software resource for teachers.

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'Breathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourful' Mail on Sunday'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It is brilliant, gripping and sad' Harry MountRestoration Heart is a story of love, double divorce and redemption. It is a biography of the heart, and of a house. When William Cash suffers a post-divorce, mid-life breakdown, aged 43, life seemed bleak - but things were about to change. Like William himself, his old Shropshire family house Upton Cressett was in as much in need of being rescued and 'fixed up' as its owner. As William embarks on re-building his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out.Drawing on his haul of letters written to various wives, fiancées and girlfriends - all potential third wives - the book follows Cash's search for a chatelaine for Upton Cressett. Restoration Heart is a tempestuous, Gulliver-like voyage of the heart with a colourful cast of figures including Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Hurley, David Hockney, Piers Morgan, an American singer legend cousin and, most dramatically, future prime minister Boris Johnson. Hilarious and poignant, this 'restore-a-wreck' memoir is an account of how an Englishman is rescued by love, architecture and beauty. The memoir also holds up a dark lens to the Bonfire of the Vanities generation that Cash was a member of at Cambridge.The story reveals how a broken man can become completely transformed - both emotionally and imaginatively - by a building and its surrounding landscape. During the four year refurbishment, the house's reclamation becomes inexorably linked with his own re-birth and salvation before he finally marries for the third time and gets to live in his family house. This is not a misery-memoir; it is an uplifting - albeit tempestuous - Gulliver-like biography of the heart with an ancient Elizabethan house as the writer's Arcadian safe house and source of salvation.

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'Claire's honest, raw, authentic diaries will be a source of comfort to many'- Miranda Hart At the age of 54 Claire Gilbert was diagnosed with myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood. The prognoses ranged from surviving only a few months to living for several decades, with no guarantee of which outcome was to be hers. It was a shocking diagnosis into uncertainty, or rather, into only one certainty: death. But Claire discovered that facing her own mortality was liberating. She discovered this through writing letters. Claire asked her siblings and a small group of friends if they would let her write to them with total honesty about what she was going through, as she was going through it. These letters turned out to be a great solace, and gradually her group of 'dear readers' has grown; what she had to say wasn't just of value to herself, but to others, too. The letters chart Claire's journey through diagnosis, chemotherapy and a brutal round of stem cell treatment, and end with the rest of the UK joining her in her immuno-compromised isolation in March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Unflinchingly honest and wide-ranging, Claire writes about the restorative role of nature, politics, poetry, humour - and a restless exploration of the spiritual dimension of death and dying. This is an honest, luminous account of what Claire has gone through and what keeps her going, a deeply spiritual meditation on life and suffering, and an exploration of how faith is no simple solace but provides a whole new plane of meaning during these liminal moments.'Claire Gilbert's account of the progress of her fatal illness, from diagnosis through various traumatic treatments, is in turn candid, painful, funny, tender, fierce and philosophical. But most of all it is a marvellously enjoyable read depicting the human spirit at its finest: defiant, exuberant, joyous. An example to us all that we can triumph over the cruellest adversity'- Salley Vickers

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A leading psychiatrist and expert reveals important issues in mental health care today and introduces innovations to revolutionize and improve mental health for everyone.Mental health care systems are falling short and the consequences, for individuals and societies, are dire. In this urgent book, celebrated psychiatrist and mental health care advocate Dr. David Goldbloom outlines proven innovations in medicine and health care delivery that we all could benefit from today. Using fictional—but all too real—examples of people suffering from various mental illnesses, from depression to opioid addiction, and drawn from his real-life experiences in this field, Dr. Goldbloom shows barriers to care and other faults in mental health care systems. He then reveals simple, yet startlingly effective tools for improving access and treatment that can help people now—if we only had the will to share, use, and fund these (and more) brilliant innovations: -Self-referrals for faster access to care -Apps and e-tools for treatment, rehabilitation, and self-monitoring between appointments -Remote coaching for effectively treating common childhood problems -Integrated youth services to improve early intervention -Personalized care to ensure treatments don’t fail patients -Rapid-access housing for the homeless and mentally ill so they can begin a journey of care While technologies such as smart phones and genetic testing play a role, these innovations are about people. They address waiting times to see specialists, the lack of coordination between health care institutions, and the stigma that often comes with seeking help—even stigma among health care providers. They broaden the definition of what mental health care can even be, such as providing housing, or low-intensity training for day-to-day life. Smart, candid, personal, and persuasive, this new book is a timely call for better access to and quality of help—a roadmap to better well-being for everyone.

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What are you chasing? Are you doing everything right but still feel empty? Are you so busy doing things for God and everyone else that you altogether miss him? Do you ever, in your busy life, stop and see him, really see him? Jennie Allen felt paralyzed in her relationship with God. It occurred to her that maybe she was chasing the wrong things. Maybe God was after something else. When she stumbled across the phrase in 1 Samuel 13, "David was a man after God's own heart," she was intrigued. She knew David was both completely broken, and completely sold out for God. David's life shatters our ideas of what God wants from us. In Chase, Jennie shows us a man who spent his life chasing after God, which points to several things we shouldn't be chasing: Don't chase self-worth by achieving more Don't chase freedom by protecting yourself Don't chase approval by being moral Don't chase love by running away from guilt Don't chase answers by rejecting God Don't chase satisfaction by rebelling Don't chase fulfillment. Chase God! The Chase Leader's Guide serves as a tool to prepare you in leading this study and to encourage you along the way. It helps you as the leader to effectively point your group to the overarching theme of each lesson. This leader's guide includes: The vision for Chase Session-by-session helps to guide your group through the study, addressing the needs of the various types of learners in your group. Walk-through for using each piece of the study: Videos, the personal study projects in the Study Guide, and the Discussion Cards. Helpful tips for leading a group, and much more. Designed for use with the following items, each sold separately: Chase Study Guide (9781418549350) Chase Video Study DVD (9780529104342) Chase Discussion Card Set (9781401677794)

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Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! It's easier than you think. In just a couple of weeks, build a ray-tracer that renders beautiful scenes with shadows, reflections, brilliant refraction effects, and subjects composed of various graphics primitives: spheres, cubes, cylinders, triangles, and more. With each chapter, implement another piece of the puzzle and move the renderer that much further forward. Do all of this in whichever language and environment you prefer, and do it entirely test-first, so you know it's correct. Recharge yourself with this project's immense potential for personal exploration, experimentation, and discovery. The renderer is a ray tracer, which means it simulates the physics of light by tracing the path of light rays around your scene. Each exciting chapter presents a bite-sized piece of the puzzle, building on earlier chapters and setting the stage for later ones. Requirements are given in plain English, which you translate into tests and code. When the project is complete, look back and realize you've built an entire system test-first! There's no research necessary -- all the necessary formulas and algorithms are presented and illustrated right here. Dive into intriguing topics from fundamental concepts such as vectors and matrices; to the algorithms that simulate the intersection of light rays with spheres, planes, cubes, cylinders, and triangles; to geometric patterns such as checkers and rings. Lighting and shading effects, such as shadows and reflections, make your scenes come to life, and constructive solid geometry (CSG) enables you to combine your graphics primitives in simple ways to produce complex shapes. Play and experiment as you discover the fun of writing a ray tracer. Accept the challenge today! What You Need: Aside from a computer, operating system, and programming environment, you'll need a way to display PPM image files. On Windows, programs like Photoshop will work, or free programs like IrfanView. On Mac, no special software is needed, as Preview can open PPM files.

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Winner, 2018 Paul J. Foik Award for Best Book on Catholic History in the American Southwest, presented by the Texas Catholic Historical Society The remarkable history of the Santuario de Chimayó, the church whose world-renowned healing powers have drawn visitors to its steps for centuries. Nestled in a valley at the feet of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, the Santuario de Chimayó has been called the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in America. To experience the Santuario’s miraculous healing dirt, pilgrims and visitors first walk into the cool, adobe church, proceeding up an aisle to the altar with its magnificent crucifix. They then turn left to enter a low-slung room filled with cast-off crutches, a statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha, and photos of thousands of people who have been prayed for in the exact spot they are standing. An adjacent room, stark by contrast, contains little but a hole in the floor, known as the pocito. From this well in the earth, the Santuario’s half a million annual visitors gather handfuls of holy dirt, celebrated for two hundred years for its purported healing properties. The book tells the fascinating stories of the Pueblo and Nuevomexicano Catholic origins of the site and the building of the church, the eventual transfer of the property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and the modern pilgrimage of believers alongside thousands of tourists. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as fieldwork in Chimayó, Brett Hendrickson examines the claims that various constituencies have made on the Santuario, its stories, dirt, ritual life, commercial value, and aesthetic character. The importance of the story of the Santuario de Chimayó goes well beyond its sacred dirt, to illuminate the role of Southwestern Hispanics and Catholics in American religious history and identity. The healing powers and marvel of the Santuario shine through the pages of Hendrickson’s book, allowing readers of all kinds to feel like they have stepped inside an institution in American and religious history.

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Winner, 2018 Paul J. Foik Award for Best Book on Catholic History in the American Southwest, presented by the Texas Catholic Historical Society The remarkable history of the Santuario de Chimayó, the church whose world-renowned healing powers have drawn visitors to its steps for centuries. Nestled in a valley at the feet of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, the Santuario de Chimayó has been called the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in America. To experience the Santuario’s miraculous healing dirt, pilgrims and visitors first walk into the cool, adobe church, proceeding up an aisle to the altar with its magnificent crucifix. They then turn left to enter a low-slung room filled with cast-off crutches, a statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha, and photos of thousands of people who have been prayed for in the exact spot they are standing. An adjacent room, stark by contrast, contains little but a hole in the floor, known as the pocito. From this well in the earth, the Santuario’s half a million annual visitors gather handfuls of holy dirt, celebrated for two hundred years for its purported healing properties. The book tells the fascinating stories of the Pueblo and Nuevomexicano Catholic origins of the site and the building of the church, the eventual transfer of the property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and the modern pilgrimage of believers alongside thousands of tourists. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as fieldwork in Chimayó, Brett Hendrickson examines the claims that various constituencies have made on the Santuario, its stories, dirt, ritual life, commercial value, and aesthetic character. The importance of the story of the Santuario de Chimayó goes well beyond its sacred dirt, to illuminate the role of Southwestern Hispanics and Catholics in American religious history and identity. The healing powers and marvel of the Santuario shine through the pages of Hendrickson’s book, allowing readers of all kinds to feel like they have stepped inside an institution in American and religious history.

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Dig deep into the data with a hands-on guide to machine learning with updated examples and more! Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals provides hands-on instruction and fully-coded working examples for the most common machine learning techniques used by developers and technical professionals. The book contains a breakdown of each ML variant, explaining how it works and how it is used within certain industries, allowing readers to incorporate the presented techniques into their own work as they follow along. A core tenant of machine learning is a strong focus on data preparation, and a full exploration of the various types of learning algorithms illustrates how the proper tools can help any developer extract information and insights from existing data. The book includes a full complement of Instructor's Materials to facilitate use in the classroom, making this resource useful for students and as a professional reference. At its core, machine learning is a mathematical, algorithm-based technology that forms the basis of historical data mining and modern big data science. Scientific analysis of big data requires a working knowledge of machine learning, which forms predictions based on known properties learned from training data. Machine Learning is an accessible, comprehensive guide for the non-mathematician, providing clear guidance that allows readers to: Learn the languages of machine learning including Hadoop, Mahout, and Weka Understand decision trees, Bayesian networks, and artificial neural networks Implement Association Rule, Real Time, and Batch learning Develop a strategic plan for safe, effective, and efficient machine learning By learning to construct a system that can learn from data, readers can increase their utility across industries. Machine learning sits at the core of deep dive data analysis and visualization, which is increasingly in demand as companies discover the goldmine hiding in their existing data. For the tech professional involved in data science, Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals provides the skills and techniques required to dig deeper.

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Robot-assisted surgery, soon to be incorporated into most surgical disciplines, can reduce postoperative complications by up to 50%, and has been shown to result in reduced blood loss, earlier hospital discharge, and faster return to normal activity for the patient. Edited by master surgeon Tony Costello, and with contributions from the world's best and most experienced robotic surgeons worldwide, Principles and Practice of Robotic Surgery is an up-to-date, all-in-one reference that provides step-by-step instruction for practicing surgeons and those who are entering robotic surgery training. This first-of-its-kind text discusses new technologies and their application in each surgical subspecialty, with hundreds of outstanding illustrations and high-quality videos-making this an ideal resource for the entire OR team. Covers every aspect of nearly all current adult and pediatric robotic surgeries in all surgical disciplines. Includes key topics such as robotic anesthesia, operating room prep and positioning of the equipment, certification for robotic training, and the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in the present and potential future use of robotic surgery. Discusses the evolution of robotic machines with a focus on new and emerging machines for surgery and education. Provides specific docking instructions with tips and tricks for each robotic operation. Offers comprehensive coverage in a magnificently illustrated, single-volume book, with contributions from an international Who's Who of the world's best robotic surgeons. Offers numerous procedural videos, including Robotic Prostatectomy: The Patel Approach; Female Pelvic Organ Sparing (POP) and Male Nerve Sparing (NS) RARC; XiXi Operating Room and Surgical Cart setup for TORS, as well as various TORS procedures; Robotic Surgery in Pediatric Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery; and more. An eBook version is included with purchase. The eBook allows you to access all of the text, figures and references, with the ability to search, customize your content, make notes and highlights, and have content read aloud.

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Premodern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable "mind scientists" whose insights anticipate modern research on the brain and mind. Aiming to complicate this story, Dan Arnold confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: since most Indian Buddhists held that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by death (its continuity is what Buddhists mean by "rebirth"), they would have no truck with the idea that everything about the mental can be explained in terms of brain events. Nevertheless, a predominant stream of Indian Buddhist thought, associated with the seventh-century thinker Dharmakirti, turns out to be vulnerable to arguments modern philosophers have leveled against physicalism. By characterizing the philosophical problems commonly faced by Dharmakirti and contemporary philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett, Arnold seeks to advance an understanding of both first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind. The issues center on what modern philosophers have called intentionality-the fact that the mind can be about (or represent or mean) other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, Arnold argues that intentionality cannot, in principle, be explained in causal terms. Elaborating some of Dharmakirti's central commitments (chiefly his apoha theory of meaning and his account of self-awareness), Arnold shows that despite his concern to refute physicalism, Dharmakirti's causal explanations of the mental mean that modern arguments from intentionality cut as much against his project as they do against physicalist philosophies of mind. This is evident in the arguments of some of Dharmakirti's contemporaneous Indian critics (proponents of the orthodox Brahmanical Mimasa school as well as fellow Buddhists from the Madhyamaka school of thought), whose critiques exemplify the same logic as modern arguments from intentionality. Elaborating these various strands of thought, Arnold shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy.

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Afghanistan's geography, complex ethnic composition, and recent history of conflict and instability have created space for numerous regional armed groups. Chapter 1 outlines major terrorist groups affiliated and allied with Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or by the Arabic acronym Da'esh) and the convoluted, often shifting relations between them and various other state and non-state actors. Chapter 2 examines the phenomenon of insurgent fragmentation within Afghanistan's Taliban and implications for the Afghan peace process. Chapter 3 reports on eight district-level studies on how the Taliban deliver services in areas of Afghanistan where they have control or dominance. Chapter 4 is based on first-hand research into the rise of Salafi-jihadism in urban areas of Afghanistan, a phenomenon that has supplied the Kabul cells of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) with abundant recruits. Chapter 5 examines whether displaced persons in Afghanistan are more vulnerable to radicalisation and mobilisation to violence than groups that have not experienced displacement. On 12 September 2020, Afghan government and Taliban representatives officially met to begin inaugural direct peace negotiations in Doha, Qatar, a significant moment with potentially dramatic implications for the course of the Afghan conflict as reported in chapter 6. Chapter 7 analyses the September 2019 Afghan presidential election, focusing on questions related to access to the elections, the counting and vote invalidation process, and political trends compared to the 2018 parliamentary and 2014 presidential elections. Chapter 8 explores the dynamics underpinning the India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan. The interests, fears, and strategies of New Delhi and Islamabad are situated within the context of the Afghan war, developments in Kashmir, terrorism, and proxy violence. Chapter 9 analyses the special immigrant visa (SIV) classifications for Iraqis and Afghans within the context of both the larger Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) special immigrant category and selected other permanent admissions categories.

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The bestselling beginner Arduino guide, updated with new projects! Exploring Arduino makes electrical engineering and embedded software accessible. Learn step by step everything you need to know about electrical engineering, programming, and human-computer interaction through a series of increasingly complex projects. Arduino guru Jeremy Blum walks you through each build, providing code snippets and schematics that will remain useful for future projects. Projects are accompanied by downloadable source code, tips and tricks, and video tutorials to help you master Arduino. You'll gain the skills you need to develop your own microcontroller projects! This new 2nd edition has been updated to cover the rapidly-expanding Arduino ecosystem, and includes new full-color graphics for easier reference. Servo motors and stepper motors are covered in richer detail, and you'll find more excerpts about technical details behind the topics covered in the book. Wireless connectivity and the Internet-of-Things are now more prominently featured in the advanced projects to reflect Arduino's growing capabilities. You'll learn how Arduino compares to its competition, and how to determine which board is right for your project. If you're ready to start creating, this book is your ultimate guide! Get up to date on the evolving Arduino hardware, software, and capabilities Build projects that interface with other devices—wirelessly! Learn the basics of electrical engineering and programming Access downloadable materials and source code for every project Whether you're a first-timer just starting out in electronics, or a pro looking to mock-up more complex builds, Arduino is a fantastic tool for building a variety of devices. This book offers a comprehensive tour of the hardware itself, plus in-depth introduction to the various peripherals, tools, and techniques used to turn your little Arduino device into something useful, artistic, and educational. Exploring Arduino is your roadmap to adventure—start your journey today!

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Data matching (also known as record or data linkage, entity resolution, object identification, or field matching) is the task of identifying, matching and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several databases or even within one database. Based on research in various domains including applied statistics, health informatics, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, database management, and digital libraries, significant advances have been achieved over the last decade in all aspects of the data matching process, especially on how to improve the accuracy of data matching, and its scalability to large databases.Peter Christen’s book is divided into three parts: Part I, “Overview”, introduces the subject by presenting several sample applications and their special challenges, as well as a general overview of a generic data matching process. Part II, “Steps of the Data Matching Process”, then details its main steps like pre-processing, indexing, field and record comparison, classification, and quality evaluation. Lastly, part III, “Further Topics”, deals with specific aspects like privacy, real-time matching, or matching unstructured data. Finally, it briefly describes the main features of many research and open source systems available today.By providing the reader with a broad range of data matching concepts and techniques and touching on all aspects of the data matching process, this book helps researchers as well as students specializing in data quality or data matching aspects to familiarize themselves with recent research advances and to identify open research challenges in the area of data matching. To this end, each chapter of the book includes a final section that provides pointers to further background and research material. Practitioners will better understand the current state of the art in data matching as well as the internal workings and limitations of current systems. Especially, they will learn that it is often not feasible to simply implement an existing off-the-shelf data matching system without substantial adaption and customization. Such practical considerations are discussed for each of the major steps in the data matching process.

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Anthony Sherley (1565-1633) was one of three brothers from a Sussex gentry family, whose adventures abroad fascinated their contemporaries. Their doings were celebrated and exaggerated in printed pamphlets and a play on the London stage, but are scarcely known today. Anthony was a soldier fighting in France and the Netherlands, and then an unsuccessful privateer, before his patron, the earl of Essex, chose him to lead a group on a mission to Ferrara, which proved abortive. Sherley then undertook on his own initiative to take his followers on a highly risky journey across Turkey to Persia. He hoped to persuade the Shah to ally with the West against their mutual enemy, Ottoman Turkey. Surprisingly, Shah Abbas the Great (1587-1629) approved the plan, and sent Sherley back to Europe as his ambassador. But after that things went badly wrong. Essex lost all influence at court, and was eventually executed for treason. Sherley was refused permission to return to England. He was on his own, and had to find new ways of living and earning. After various episodes in Venice and Morocco he ended up in the pay of Spain, and was chosen to command a fleet created to stop pirates from attacking Spanish possessions. After the failure of this project he was forced to retire to Granada, and lived the rest of his life on a meagre royal pension. But he continued trying to give advice, based on his past experiences, to the king of Spain and his ministers. The book will concentrate on Sherley's career, but will broaden the theme by including chapters on his father and his two brothers, and in particular on Persia and Shah Abbas, the Persian king whom he met. Anthony was an irascible, complex character, often derided and disliked. This biography is more sympathetic than previous ones, and discusses his self-fashioning and his belief in his personal honour, both of which might account for some of his misdemeanours, especially after the death of his patron.

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From the past decade vehicular ad hoc networks got tremendous attention from the industry, academia and research community. According to US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there are more than 30 thousands fatalities caused by the vehicle accidents in the U.S. each year, which worth around $250 billion economic cost annually. Research shows that 82% of these accidents can be reduced by the successful deployment of vehicular networks, because nearly 75% percent of vehicular crashes are caused by inattentive drivers. Literally, vehicular ad hoc networks means a network forms by the vehicles. But it has been evolved to network with the infrastructure as well due to the inherent intermittent nature of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) connection. The high mobility of vehicles, wireless communication loss and range constraints are the main reason for this intermittent V2V connection. So, now vehicular networks means communication between vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I). There are billions of dollars invested to research, deployment and testing of vehicular networks. For the emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV), a stable vehicular networks is the foremost requirement. It is now very much visible that CAV will be the future of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The book is dedicated to discuss for the techniques, applications and relevant technologies of vehicular ad hoc networks and its challenges. The first chapter discuss about the routing protocols of vehicular networks. It focuses on different position-based routing protocols and their mechanisms for the successful use of vehicular networks for different applications. The second chapter discusses on the security and privacy issues on vehicular networks. A well-known security technique called Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is discussed to secure vehicular data from various tampering attacks. The third chapter discusses on the on-demand wireless broadcasting mechanism for improving data dissemination performance in terms of data delivery ratio and response time. A network-coding based approach has been investigated for improving the overall performance of existing classical data broadcast algorithms. The fourth chapter describes how to get a dependable system in the lossy communication medium. This chapter discusses on a number of fault diagnosis techniques, their strengths and weaknesses, and it reviews their implementations in mobile wireless networks. The fifth chapter discusses the basics of Blockchain technology, applications, research challenges and opportunities in the field. Finally, chapter six discuss about the identification and mitigation of the faulty nodes in the wireless network.

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A Finalist for the NAACP Image AwardA Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for NonfictionA Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American HumorLonglisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayAn NPR Best Book of the YearA Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite of the YearFrom the host of podcast "Stuck with Damon Young," cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in AmericaFor Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant.What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him.It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white.From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.

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What it means to celebrate the potential and the power of no What does it mean to refuse? To not participate, to not build a better world, to not come up with a plan? To just say “no”? Against the ubiquitous demands for positive solutions, action-oriented policies, and optimistic compromises, The Big No refuses to play. Here leading scholars traverse the wide range of political action when “no” is in the picture, analyzing topics such as collective action, antisocialism, empirical science, the negative and the affirmative in Deleuze and Derrida, the “real” and the “clone,” Native sovereignty, and Afropessimism.In his introduction, Kennan Ferguson sums up the concept of the “Big No,” arguing for its political importance. Whatever its form—he identifies various strains—the Big No offers power against systems of oppression. Joshua Clover argues for the importance of Marx and Fanon in understanding how people are alienated and subjugated. Theodore Martin explores the attractions of antisociality in literature and life, citing such novelists as Patricia Highsmith and Richard Wright. François Laruelle differentiates nonphilosophy from other forms of French critical theory. Katerina Kolozova applies this insight to the nature of reality itself, arguing that the confusion of thought and reality leads to manipulation, automation, and alienation. Using poetry and autobiography, Frank Wilderson shows how Black people—their bodies and being—are displaced in politics, replaced and erased by the subjectivities of violence, suffering, and absence. Andrew Culp connects these themes of negativity, comparing and contrasting the refusals of antiphilosophy and Afropessimism. Thinking critically usually demands alternatives: how would you fix things? But, as The Big No shows, being absolutely critical—declining the demands of world-building—is one necessary response to wrong, to evil. It serves as a powerful reminder that the presumption of political action is always positive.Contributors: Joshua Clover, U of California Davis and U of Copenhagen; Andrew Culp, California Institute of the Arts; Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Skopje; Theodore Martin, U of California, Irvine; Anthony Paul Smith, La Salle U; Frank B. Wilderson III, U of California, Irvine.

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The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys. Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja, Blue Helmets and Black Markets is a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.

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A unique, in-depth guide to options pricing and valuing their greeks, along with a four dimensional approach towards the impact of changing market circumstances on options How to Calculate Options Prices and Their Greeks is the only book of its kind, showing you how to value options and the greeks according to the Black Scholes model but also how to do this without consulting a model. You'll build a solid understanding of options and hedging strategies as you explore the concepts of probability, volatility, and put call parity, then move into more advanced topics in combination with a four-dimensional approach of the change of the P&L of an option portfolio in relation to strike, underlying, volatility, and time to maturity. This informative guide fully explains the distribution of first and second order Greeks along the whole range wherein an option has optionality, and delves into trading strategies, including spreads, straddles, strangles, butterflies, kurtosis, vega-convexity , and more. Charts and tables illustrate how specific positions in a Greek evolve in relation to its parameters, and digital ancillaries allow you to see 3D representations using your own parameters and volumes. The Black and Scholes model is the most widely used option model, appreciated for its simplicity and ability to generate a fair value for options pricing in all kinds of markets. This book shows you the ins and outs of the model, giving you the practical understanding you need for setting up and managing an option strategy. • Understand the Greeks, and how they make or break a strategy • See how the Greeks change with time, volatility, and underlying • Explore various trading strategies • Implement options positions, and more Representations of option payoffs are too often based on a simple two-dimensional approach consisting of P&L versus underlying at expiry. This is misleading, as the Greeks can make a world of difference over the lifetime of a strategy. How to Calculate Options Prices and Their Greeks is a comprehensive, in-depth guide to a thorough and more effective understanding of options, their Greeks, and (hedging) option strategies.

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The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys. Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja, Blue Helmets and Black Markets is a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.

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Social Sciences in Sport presents discipline-specific knowledge in the social sciences, which aids in understanding the problems and potential of contemporary sport practices and experiences. This interdisciplinary reference provides in-depth coverage of sport studies and 14 social sciences, drawing connections across these disciplines to illuminate key issues and illustrate possibilities for change. Written by leading figures in the social sciences, the book synthesizes theory and research in social science and sport into four distinct areas: • Identity, which discusses individual development and ethical considerations from history, philosophy, and psychology • Community, which considers anthropology, sociology, geography, and media studies when looking at sport in social groups • Capital, which draws research in status, wealth, power, and resources from economics, political science, and international relations • Governance, which discusses the enhancement of sport through law, social policy, management studies, and education Organized around these topics into four parts, this reference places sport in the broader social sciences, showing where researchers in kinesiology and other disciplines can augment their knowledge base. Noting the range of issues and concerns in today’s sport environment, readers will analyze the potential of a human development model in sport studies. Editor Joseph Maguire and an esteemed team of contributors present the evolution of sport in various social sciences. A stage-setting introduction explains the relevance of a social scientific perspective on sport and physical activity, and part introductions outline many relationships between the social sciences and sport. Chapters include a historical overview of the discipline or subject area, the core concepts and main theoretical perspectives in that area of expertise, critical findings, and the contemporary debates that characterize sport. Equipped with the social scientific knowledge and new perspectives from this essential collection, students and practitioners will be able to navigate classic and emerging issues in sport. Whether readers are social scientists considering sport as a subject of study or sport studies scholars attempting to make connections with the broader disciplines, Social Sciences in Sport promotes development of and through sport.

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This book will help you analyze traces and logs from different software environments and communicate analysis results using a pattern language that covers everything from a small debugging log to a distributed trace with billions of messages from hundreds of computers, thousands of software components, threads, and processes. The book begins with the basic terminology of operating systems and programming, the foundation for understanding trace and log analysis. It then talks about patterns that help describe problems from a user’s view and patterns for errors and failures. Then, the book covers a range of trace patterns that group messages, and explores how logs depict software activities. It even examines specific message patterns and how they connect in a single trace. Moving forward, you’ll review patterns for multiple traces and logs and how to evaluate them. In this way, you can use similar methods to find problems across a wide variety of software. The book also provides guidance for analyzing issues on systems such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and other types of computers, including those in networks and the Internet of Things, regardless of their system differences. Upon completing this book, you will be able to navigate the complexities of trace and log analysis and apply uniform diagnostics and anomaly detection pattern language across diverse software environments to help you troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues. What You Will Learn Understand pattern language for trace and log analysis Gain a pattern-oriented methodology for trace and log analysis applicable to various domains, including cybersecurity Master the fundamentals of operating systems and programming related to trace and log analysis Understand observed behavior in traces and logs, which aids incident response, diagnostics, root cause analysis, troubleshooting, and debugging Who This Book Is For Software technical support engineers, system and network administrators, software developers, testers, DevOps and DevSecOps, digital forensics and malware analysts, security incident response engineers, data analysts, and data mining practitioners.

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The name of Carl Hagenbeck is as evocative in Europe as that of P. T. Barnum or Walt Disney in North America. Hagenbeck was the nineteenth century's foremost animal trader and ethnographic showman, known for his enormously popular displays of people, animals, and artifacts gathered from all corners of the globe. The culmination of Hagenbeck's commercial ventures was the opening of his Tierpark near Hamburg in 1907, a dazzling assemblage of constructed exotic environments inhabited by humans and animals. Eric Ames shows that Hagenbeck's various enterprises illustrate a significant evolution in popular culture. Earlier display forms that relied on the collection and presentation of “authentic” artifacts and living beings--the panorama, the zoological garden, the ethnographic collection--gave rise to the self-consciously synthetic forms of entertainment that we now associate with theme parks and films. This shift took place in the context of Hagenbeck's exhibitions, which were simultaneously the apotheosis of the collecting impulse and the germinating source for the creation of fictional spaces that rely for their effect on the spectator's imaginative engagement and interaction with the spectacle. Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments locates Hagenbeck's myriad enterprises in the context of colonialism and nascent globalization; ethnography and anthropology; zoological gardens and international expositions; museum culture and visual spectacle; and consumerism and immersive entertainments. By tracing out the divergent lineages of themed environments, Ames offers a vivid reconstruction of the impulses and contradictions that lay behind the visual and display culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a culture that forms the foundation of contemporary themed environments. Written in an accessible style with many wonderful images, this book draws on meticulous archival research and a wealth of primary sources not available in English. It is an original and entertaining interdisciplinary study that will appeal to readers interested in visual culture, popular culture, nineteenth-century German history, and film studies, as well as anyone intrigued by the history of such popular entertainments as zoos, museums, panoramas, world's fairs, cinema, theme parks, anthropological exhibitions, and Wild West Shows.

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In 2023, one hundred years have passed from the dissolution of the Great Northern Railway. Formed in the mid-1840s, the company was instrumental in connecting London with the eastern half of England, the North East and Scotland. Later, the GNR made inroads into other parts of the country, such as Nottinghamshire and West Yorkshire. The GNR successfully served the population for nearly a century and was able to innovate in several areas, with developments in locomotive design, carriage construction and services offered. The Glorious Years of the GNR presents several of these areas of the company using over 250 superb black-and-white images, coupled with interesting and informative captions. Boasting several world-renowned engineers, the locomotives of Archibald Sturrock, Patrick Stirling, H.A. Ivatt and H.N. Gresley (later Sir) are featured in various scenes from across the GNR’s network. The company’s coaching stock is also presented, ranging from E.F. Howlden’s six-wheelers to 12-wheel clerestory vehicles and Gresley’s articulated suburban and main line trains. Arguably, Doncaster was the most important place on the GNR, therefore a focus has been placed on the town’s workshops. A number of interesting scenes are included showing the workforce, construction of the Crimpsall Repair Shop, as well as women war workers during the Great War. A small section is dedicated to the GNR’s stations, which ranged from the grand terminus at King’s Cross to humble buildings serving small villages. A number of these have been lost subsequently. Often with staff posing happily for the camera, the stations recall a time when a high standard of service was expected and offered rather than the cost saving and utilitarian facilities of the present. In an era before the motor car, when the world was horse-drawn and steam powered, the GNR was part of a ‘golden age’ of British history. The centenary of the company’s demise provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on this distant, yet great period. A superb edition with over 250 outstanding photographs and thoroughly researched, informative captions. Beautifully produced in hardback with rare and previously unseen images

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Handbook of Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics, Second Edition reflects the tremendous growth in the field, over the past two decades. Through contributions from leading experts, this handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the underlying theory and methodologies, as well as the various applications of approximation algorithms and metaheuristics.Volume 1 of this two-volume set deals primarily with methodologies and traditional applications. It includes restriction, relaxation, local ratio, approximation schemes, randomization, tabu search, evolutionary computation, local search, neural networks, and other metaheuristics. It also explores multi-objective optimization, reoptimization, sensitivity analysis, and stability. Traditional applications covered include: bin packing, multi-dimensional packing, Steiner trees, traveling salesperson, scheduling, and related problems.Volume 2 focuses on the contemporary and emerging applications of methodologies to problems in combinatorial optimization, computational geometry and graphs problems, as well as in large-scale and emerging application areas. It includes approximation algorithms and heuristics for clustering, networks (sensor and wireless), communication, bioinformatics search, streams, virtual communities, and more.About the EditorTeofilo F. Gonzalez is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Minnesota. He taught at the University of Oklahoma, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Texas at Dallas, before joining the UCSB computer science faculty in 1984. He spent sabbatical leaves at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education and Utrecht University. He is known for his highly cited pioneering research in the hardness of approximation; for his sublinear and best possible approximation algorithm for k-tMM clustering; for introducing the open-shop scheduling problem as well as algorithms for its solution that have found applications in numerous research areas; as well as for his research on problems in the areas of job scheduling, graph algorithms, computational geometry, message communication, wire routing, etc.

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Do you find yourself living as the people pleaser or peacekeeper? Do you avoid conflict? Learn how to overcome your fears about setting boundaries and step into a life that's overflowing with love, respect, and healthy relationships.We are people who love patterns, even if returning to these patterns continues to hurt us or those we love. Some of the most harmful patterns of behavior are passed down through generations and inherited, often without our permission or awareness. The conflict arises when these behaviors are so deeply woven into early family systems that they later become part of our identities, clashing with who God has created and called us to be.As a child, Courtney Burg quickly learned that remaining loyal to others meant keeping secrets, even if these secrets were keeping those she cared for most sick. Her efforts to sustain the peace followed her into adulthood and slowly left her depleted, discouraged, and drowning in the chaos—until Courtney discovered that not only did God grant her permission to engage in relationships differently, but that he gave her specific instruction on how to do so.In Loyal to a Fault, Courtney Burg unpacks the various ways we cope with, enable, and participate in unhealthy relationships or generational trauma. Using personal examples and providing practical wisdom, Courtney helps you break free from codependent patterns by: Identifying the role you are playing in keeping the dysfunctional patterns going. Reframing what it means to love and remain loyal to those who matter most. Reminding you that boundary work is a biblical practice. Including end-of-chapter prompts for deeper introspection. It is possible to learn how to love others well without losing yourself along the way. People pleasing, complaining, and exhaustion may be today's norm, but at any moment you can choose to do things differently. Begin setting boundaries and start enjoying relationships in all the ways God designed you to.

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Trusted for more than 30 years, Drain's PeriAnesthesia Nursing: A Critical Care Approach, 8th Edition provides comprehensive clinical content tailored specifically for perianesthesia nurses. An easy-to-use format with five distinct sections - covering the PACU, anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, nursing care, and special considerations - means you get the equivalent of five books in one. Nursing and pharmacologic interventions are integrated with in-depth coverage of pathophysiology, and updated content includes the latest standards and current issues affecting perianesthesia nursing practice. Focusing on research, documentation, and psychosocial considerations, this is the one book that can take you all the way from being a novice nurse in the PACU to preparing for CPAN® or CAPA® certification! Five separate sections provide comprehensive coverage, including the PACU, anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, nursing care, and special considerations. Coverage of current policies and issues affecting perianesthesia nursing practice includes patient safety, infection control, managed care implications, pain management, and bioterrorism. Comprehensive information on the various types of anesthetic agents familiarizes you with what will be used in the PACU. Special Considerations section details the care of patients with conditions such as malignant hyperthermia, substance abuse, sickle cell anemia, and cardiac arrest. UPDATED! Revised content throughout provides the most up-to-date information for effective perianesthesia nursing practice. NEW! Full-color layout makes content more visually appealing and highlights important information. NEW! Information on SARS/COVID-19 is now included in the Pathogens chapter. NEW! Chapter on International Care of the Perianesthesia Patient offers complete coverage on this key topic. UPDATED! Coverage of pain management for the perianesthesia patient features the latest guidelines. UPDATED! Patient with Chronic Disorders chapter provides current information on caring for these patients. UPDATED! Evidence-Based Research boxes provide the latest standards of care.

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An engaging account of the life of a nineteenth-century priest. The Revd Benjamin Armstrong, for many years vicar of the market town of East Dereham, Norfolk, is best-known for what have been described as "one of England's greatest clerical diaries", eleven volumes spanning his whole adult life, between 1850 and 1888. This first full biography puts his story into the context of the period in which he lived: a time of turmoil in the church, with its conflict between high and low forms of service, and theological arguments, stirred up not least by controversies over Darwin's theories of creation. It also vividly portrays rural life at a time of great change, when society became more fluid, railways allowed the economy to grow and develop, and thevote was extended. We see this through the eyes of Armstrong himself, a fine example of the then "new-style" Church of England clergy who lived in their parishes, took more services than their predecessors, supported their schools and showed a genuine concern for the well-being of their parishioners. By the time he retired, church life in Dereham had been transformed, with congregations typically of 1,000 at each of the Sunday services. Armstrong also served on various Local Boards, as well as setting up the Literary Institute, the Rifle Volunteers and supporting musical and cultural events. He also had a full social life; his friends included prominent townspeople and the local clergy, gentry and aristocracy -- and there are incisive pen portraits of many of his associates and their eccentricities. These activities are set against the background of his family life, with its moments of tragedy and worry, including the death of a young child and the elopement of another. Dr SUSANNA WADE MARTINS is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. Her previous publications includeThe East Anglian Countryside: Changing Landscapes 1870-1950 with Tom Williamson (2008), Coke of Norfolk, 1754-1842 (2009) and The Conservation Movement in Norfolk - A History (2015).

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Tackling one of the most controversial subjects of our time, one of the world's foremost environmental and petroleum engineers explores the potential causes and ramifications of global climate change. For too many years climate change (also referred to as global warming) has been assigned predominantly to the emissions of carbon dioxide through the combustion of fossil fuels. It must never be forgotten or ignored, however, that the Earth has been constantly changing since its formation and has gone through different eras like glaciations, among others. These changes need thousands of years to be made visible, and are likely still continuing, given the increase in the average temperature of the Earth since the pre-industrial period (provided that the measurements of past climatic temperatures are accurate and beyond reproach). It follows that the warming trend that has occurred over the past 100 years is very likely to have some origins in natural events as well as in human activity. The precise contributions of natural effects and anthropogenic effects on the climate are not known, but it is accurate to conclude that many factors continue to influence climate. Whether or not human activities have become a dominant force in the changing climate and are responsible for most of the warming observed is still open to question. When studying the climate system of the Earth, an area of common confusion is whether climate scientists agree or disagree as to whether or not climate change is happening, or if it is happening, whether or not humans are the primary cause. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a majority of scientists who study climate and publish in peer-reviewed journals agree that human activity is causing the warming of the Earth. The purpose of this book is to weigh all of these various data points and, in a scientific and unemotional way, arrive at likely conclusions regarding global climate change. Whether human activity is the main driver behind our current changes in climate, one thing is certain: Climate change is happening, and we all need to make informed, rather than emotional, decisions.

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Learn to allocate scarce library resources to meet learning, research, and service goals!How can you buy more books and journals with less money, while also installing the latest software and hardware, paying staff to train faculty and students in its use, offering the new round-the-clock information services users demand, and redefining the traditional collection-centered model of the library? It sounds impossible, but these are the conflicting imperatives every collections librarian faces at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Collection Development in the Electronic Environment offers solid, practical advice from the experience of other librarians who have met the same challenges, as well as useful information from vendors. Based on the conference Collection Development in the Electronic Environment: Shifting Priorities, this informative book suggests proven, effective strategies to deal with a librarian's most pressing problems. One case study shows how Iowa State University turned a cutback in journals into a new vision of what the library should be, involving a broad-based committee in the project. Other chapters discuss the specifics of budgeting for the unpredictable pricing of electronic materials, the increased demands on library staff, and the challenges of maintaining dual libraries--the electronic and the paper-based--both facing expensive issues of preservation.Collection Development in the Electronic Environment offers help and advice on the most complex and difficult issues librarians confront: planning changes in library structure, function, and activities building new models for collection development identifying and fulfilling the needs of scholars in various disciplines redefining staff roles and responsibilities setting priorities in journal purchases using electronic innovations to enhance collection development dealing with copyright, fair use, and intellectual property in electronic formats Through case studies and firsthand experiences, Collection Development in the Electronic Environment provides you with the fresh ideas and proven strategies you need to guide your library into the electronic era.

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During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War. He shows that the game was a vital part of the lives of many a soldier and civilian--and that baseball's popularity had everything to do with surging American nationalism. By 1860, baseball was poised to emerge as the American sport. Clubs in northeastern and a few southern cities played various forms of the game. Newspapers published statistics, and governing bodies set rules. But the Civil War years proved crucial in securing the game's place in the American heart. Soldiers with bats in their rucksacks spread baseball to training camps, war prisons, and even front lines. As nationalist fervor heightened, baseball became patriotic. Fans honored it with the title of national pastime. War metaphors were commonplace in sports reporting, and charity games were scheduled. Decades later, Union general Abner Doubleday would be credited (wrongly) with baseball's invention. The Civil War period also saw key developments in the sport itself, including the spread of the New York-style of play, the advent of revised pitching rules, and the growth of commercialism. Kirsch recounts vivid stories of great players and describes soldiers playing ball to relieve boredom. He introduces entrepreneurs who preached the gospel of baseball, boosted female attendance, and found new ways to make money. We witness bitterly contested championships that enthralled whole cities. We watch African Americans embracing baseball despite official exclusion. And we see legends spring from the pens of early sportswriters. Rich with anecdotes and surprising facts, this narrative of baseball's coming-of-age reveals the remarkable extent to which America's national pastime is bound up with the country's defining event.

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Hailed in Sacred Scripture as the “beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111:10), the “fear of the Lord” is seldom mentioned and little understood today. A gift of the Spirit and a moral virtue or disposition, the “fear of the Lord” also frequently entails emotional experiences of differing kinds: compunction, dread, reverence, wonderment, and awe. Starting with the Bible itself, this collection of seventeen essays explores the place of holy fear in Christian spirituality from the early church to the present and argues that this fear is paradoxically linked in various ways to fear’s seeming opposite, love. Indeed, the charged dynamic of love and fear accounts for different experiences and expressions of Christian life in response to changing historical circumstances and events. The writings of the theologians, mystics, philosophers, saints, and artists studied here reveal the relationship between the fear and the love of God to be profoundly challenging and mysterious, its elements paradoxically conjoined in a creative tension with each other, but also tending to oscillate back-and-forth in the history of Christian spirituality as first one, then the other, comes to the fore, sometimes to correct a perceived imbalance, sometimes at the risk of losing its companion altogether. Given this historical pattern, clearly evident in these chronologically arranged essays, the palpable absence of a discourse of holy fear from the mainstream theological landscape should give us pause and invite us to consider if and how—under what aspect, in which contexts—a holy fear, inseparable from love, might be regained or discovered anew within Christian spirituality as a remedy both for a crippling anxiety and for a presumptive recklessness. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Christian spirituality, theology, biblical studies, religious studies, and religion and literature. Contributors: Ann W. Astell, Pieter G. R. de Villiers, Donna R. Hawk-Reinhard, John Sehorn, Catherine Rose Cavadini, Joseph Wawrykow, Robert Boenig, Ralph Keen, Wendy M. Wright, Ephraim Radner, Julia A. Lamm, Cyril O’Regan, Brenna Moore, Maj-Britt Frenze, and Todd Walatka

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Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile examines the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the reconquest and the hundred years that followed the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). The study’s focus on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, allows for a detailed investigation of the Jews’ changing relations with the area’s main power players—the monarchy, the church, and the towns. In a departure from previous assessments, Soifer Irish shows that the institutional and legal norms of toleration for the Jewish minority were forged not along the military frontier with Islam, but in the north of Castile. She argues that the Jews’ relationship with the Castilian monarchy was by far the most significant factor that influenced their situation in the kingdom, but also demonstrates that this relationship was inherently problematic. Although during the earlycenturies of Christian expansion the Jewish communities benefitedfrom a strong royal power, after about 1250 helping maintain it proved to be costly to the Jewish communities in economic and human terms. Soifer Irish demonstrates that while some Castilian clergymen were vehemently anti-Jewish, the Castilian Church as a whole never developeda coordinated strategy on the Jews, or even showed much interest in the issue. The opposite is true about the townsmen, whose relations with their Jewish neighbors vacillated between cooperation and conflict. In the late thirteenth century, the Crown’s heavy-handed tactics in enforcing the collection of outstanding debts to Jewish moneylenders led to the breakdown in the negotiations between the Jewish and Christian communities, creating a fertile ground for the formation of an anti-Jewish discourse in Castilian towns. Soifer Irish also examines the Jews’ attitudes toward the various powers in the Christian society and shows that they were active players in the kingdom’s politics. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile breaks new ground in helping us understand more fully the tensions, and commonalities, between groups of different faiths in the late medieval period

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The 'Wild West', or American Frontier as it is also known, developed in the years following the American Civil War. However, this period of myth-making cowboys, infamous gunslingers, not always law-abiding lawmen, and saloon madams, is as much the product of fiction writers and film makers as reality. The outlaw came into his, or indeed her, own in the mid to late 19th century. Some of these individuals, men such as Billy the Kid, William Clarke Quantrill, Butch Cassidy or Harry Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, became household names. Many of those who roamed America's West in the period between 1850 and 1900 often appear as colourful, romanticised, legendary characters. This includes the likes of Frank and Jesse James, who had stepped outside the law due to the harshness of life after the Civil War or under circumstances beyond their control. The majority of outlaws, though, were anonymous common criminals. In 1877, for example, the State Adjutant General of Texas, published 'wanted posters' for some 5,000 outlaws and bandits in the Rio Grande district alone, almost all of whom have since vanished into the mists of time. When it comes to the Wild West, it is important to separate fact from fiction. Of the known recorded killings by the various outlaws and gunfighters, Billy the Kid killed four men, not the twenty that some writers attributed to him. A notorious gunslinger, John Wesley Hardin was said to have killed twenty-seven men, but was only charged with one murder. Wild Bill Hickok killed three men, two of them in Abilene whilst he was City Marshal, and one in Springfield, Missouri, for which he was tried and found not guilty. Clay Allison, however, was thought to have killed at least fifteen men in his time as a gunfighter, whilst some of the outlaw gangs, such as the Rufus Buck Gang and the Evans Gang, were particularly violent and ruthless. The days of the outlaws of the Wild West gradually came to an end at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The legends, however, live on.

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The world of business books is a curious place where one can find everyone from great businesspeople like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, to the most spectacular business failures such as Enron and the sub-prime business market. There are geniuses, hard workers, academics and entrepreneurs as well a few charlatans and hucksters. There's even room for Donald Trump. The 70 titles covered were chosen with various parameters in mind: to cover a range of areas of business, from sales and marketing to negotiation, entrepreneurship to investing, leadership to innovation, and from traditional and corporate models of business to start-up manuals and alternative angles on the subject. Obvious bestselling titles such as How to Make Friends and Influence People or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been included, but there are also those books of more questionable value often included on recommended lists of business classics, included here by way of warning. The chosen books also cover a wide span of time and acknowledge that some of the most powerful or entertaining insights into business can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'business books', for instance The Art of War, Microserfs, Thinking Fast and Slow and The Wealth of Nations.The selection includes a good range of the most recent successes in business publishing with which readers may be less familiar. The titles are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to dip in, but also casting an intriguing light on how trends in business titles have changed over the years. Among these titles, you will find expert advice, based on solid research (for instance The Effective Executive or Getting to Yes), and inspirational guides to setting up businesses and running them on sound foundations (such as True North, Crucial Conversations, or We) alongside dubious management manuals that take a single flawed idea and stretch it out to the point of absurdity. The hope is that the reader will be inspired to read the best of these titles, ignore the worst of them, and will come away with at least a basic idea of what each has to teach us about business.

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This book investigates the life and work, and the literary and historical background, of the most popular Armenian poet and minstrel of the early modern era, Arut'in called Sayat'-Nova (c. 1712-1795). The most important of his songs in Armenian, Tiflis Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Turkish, one in four languages (these plus Persian), are edited in a unified transliteration from the original Georgian and Armenian scripts on the texts in the Tetrak, a 1765/6 MS in at least partly his own hand, and versions made in 1823 at St. Petersburg by his youngest son Ioane, with notes on variants, loanwords, cryptica ("trobar clus"), puns, etc. Six odes in poor Russian, hitherto ignored, are examined for motive and sentiments. Chapters are devoted to versification, genres and influences (mainly Persian), an attempt being made to analyse the attraction of his verse. Comparisons are drawn with the work, and where relevant the lives of Sappho, Ovid (fellow exile), Hafiz, Bernard de Ventadorn (fellow victim of the backbiter), Shakespeare (and his Dark Lady), etc. Sayat'-Nova's poems are mainly love-songs, others, mainly in Georgian, are complaints to his patron (eulogised as "the Emperor of China", etc.) concerning injustices at his hand and those of Georgian courtiers who held him, and Armenian Orthodox (which he was proud to be, as he declared in Azeri) among Georgian Orthodox and Muslims, for an unwelcome upstart. His religious odes (ilahis) and his religious views, to some extent coloured by Islam, are discussed. According to tradition, he died a martyr, refusing to apostasize when challenged by the troops of Agha Mahmad Khan on the invasion of Tiflis in 1795. Sayat'-Nova considered himself a builder of bridges between the various ethnic cultures of Georgia in whose languages he sang, reflecting the statesman-like aspirations of his royal patron. The present work is one of the few to treat the poems in each language on an equal basis.

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William Blake called himself a "sublime Artist" and acknowledged his own power to create "the Most Sublime Poetry." Words of Eternity reveals the fundamental importance of the term "sublime" in a defining of Blake's poetic achievement. This first full-length study of Blake and the sublime demonstrates that a sophisticated theory of sublimity permeates his writings, serving him as a personal poetics, a framework in which the difficulties and unusual strategies of the works find their rationale. Vincent De Luca combines historically grounded source study with insights from modern critical theories of textuality to identify Blake's two opposing conceptions of sublimity--a sublime of obscurity, terror, and material power and one of determinate, concentrated intellectual design. De Luca examines the interplay between these two modes from differing perspectives--theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. As the perspectives widen, they embrace many of the speculative systems of Blake's time and reveal these systems as various displaced modalities of an underlying sublime discourse. "Words of Eternity is one of the dozen or so most important books ever written about Blake's poetry. De Luca provides a wealth of new insights on every page."--Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside "With the context that this book supplies, we take a quantum leap in the sense we can make of Blake's project. De Luca opens our eyes to a Blake, and a sublime, that will never again be the same for us."--Nelson Hilton, University of Georgia Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Global Media Ethics Global Media EthicsProblems and Perspectives “The book pleads convincingly that news media outlets and practitioners should urgently reconsider their practices and norms in a world gone global and digitally convergent. The various contributions broach the topic from completely different perspectives to create a very stimulating and constructive framework to identify and face the new ethical challenges of journalism and the news media.”François Heinderyckx, Université libre de Bruxelles “News that crosses boundaries of culture and geography means rethinking media ethics. The demands of role, audience, digital transmission, and an industry under fierce economic pressure require the insightful approach to ethical thinking this volume provides. From theory to practice, this book has something for scholars and professionals alike.”Lee Wilkins, Journal of Mass Media Ethics Global Media Ethics is a cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. Focusing on the ethical concepts, principles, and questions in an era of major change, this unique textbook explores the aims and norms that should guide the publication of stories that impact across borders, and which affect a globally linked, pluralistic world. Through case studies, analysis of emerging practices, and theoretical discussion, a team of leading journalism and communication experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism and lead readers to better understand changes in media ethics. Chapters look at how these changes promote or inhibit responsible journalism, how such changes challenge existing standards, and how media ethics can develop to take account of global news media. In light of the fact that media journalism is now, and will increasingly become, multimedia in format and global in its scope and influence, the book argues that global media impact entails global responsibilities: It is therefore critical that media ethics rethinks its basic notions, standards, and practices from a more cosmopolitan perspective.

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Environmental Impact Statements focuses on the roles of the variousparticipants in the EIS review process. Whether you are an EISauthor or reviewer, member of a public agency, a private sectorconsultant, a developer, environmental activist, or privatecitizen, understanding your own role and the roles of others in theprocess will increase your effectiveness, reduce duplication ofeffort, and save time and money. This hands-on guide offers a unique, comprehensive approach topreparing, managing, and reviewing an EIS. It chronicles thepreparation process step by step, from kickoff meeting throughfinal submission and, unlike other books, it integrates technicaldiscussions on the regulatory environment and impact analysis intothe planning chronology instead of treating them independently. Thebook's combined emphasis on process and interaction of rolesenables participants to adapt each step to their own federal orstate EIS projects. Author Diori Kreske explains all concepts needed to understand theEIS process and presents them first at an introductory level andlater in greater detail. In the first half of the book sheintroduces readers to the EIS process, defines the roles andresponsibilities of major participants, and discusses the processin relation to federal and state requirements and court decisions.Then Kreske concentrates on the nuts and bolts of preparing andmanaging an EIS. She describes how to build an EIS team, establishthe statement's framework, manage the preparation process,determine when and how to involve the public, and write and reviewEISs. Whatever your role in the EIS process, and wherever your interestslie, this invaluable resource will help you develop a clearunderstanding of your responsibilities within the definedrequirements and ensure that the process will be more effective inaccomplishing its stated purpose: to reduce the negative impacts ofour actions on the environment. Environmental Impact Statements is the first book to approach thepreparation and management of the EIS process through the roles andresponsibilities of process participants. It enables participantsto reduce conflicts, avoid duplication of effort, and mostimportantly, produce a more useful EIS. This invaluable bookprovides a step-by-step guide to preparing an EIS that can bereadily adapted to any state or federal EIS project. It also: * Explains major participants' roles and how their responsibilitiesand goals can be effectively integrated into the process * Describes the responsibilities and perspectives of both thepublic and private sectors * Gives how-to advice on preparing and managing the EIS process * Offers suggestions on how EIS teams can streamline the processand reduce time, effort, and paperwork * Provides case studies that illustrate the preparation andmanagement of EISs * Includes numerous illustrations, an extensive list of acronyms,and appendices useful in preparing EISs, including NEPA and CEQregulations For anyone involved in the EIS process, this unique resource willmake you a more effective participant and help you produce a moreaccurate, reliable, and effective EIS.

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System Performance Tuning answers one of the most fundamental questions you can ask about your computer: How can I get it to do more work without buying more hardware? In the current economic downturn, performance tuning takes on a new importance. It allows system administrators to make the best use of existing systems and minimize the purchase of new equipment. Well-tuned systems save money and time that would otherwise be wasted dealing with slowdowns and errors. Performance tuning always involves compromises; unless system administrators know what the compromises are, they can't make intelligent decisions. Tuning is an essential skill for system administrators who face the problem of adapting the speed of a computer system to the speed requirements imposed by the real world. It requires a detailed understanding of the inner workings of the computer and its architecture. System Performance Tuning covers two distinct areas: performance tuning, or the art of increasing performance for a specific application, and capacity planning, or deciding what hardware best fulfills a given role. Underpinning both subjects is the science of computer architecture. This book focuses on the operating system, the underlying hardware, and their interactions. Topics covered include: *Real and perceived performance problems, introducing capacity planning and performance monitoring (highlighting their strengths and weaknesses). *An integrated description of all the major tools at a system administrator's disposal for tracking down system performance problems. *Background on modern memory handling techniques, including the memory-caching filesystem implementations in Solaris and AIX. Updated sections on memory conservation and computing memory requirements. *In depth discussion of disk interfaces, bandwidth capacity considerations, and RAID systems. *Comprehensive discussion of NFS and greatly expanded discussion of networking. *Workload management and code tuning. *Special topics such as tuning Web servers for various types of content delivery and developments in cross-machine parallel computing For system administrators who want a hands-on introduction to system performance, this is the book to recommend.

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Christian Downie's historical look at the negotiating behavior of the United States and the European Union during international efforts to implement a meaningful climate change treaty, go a long way toward explaining why current negotiations are bogged down. His findings about the impact of domestic politics on international negotiations should not be overlooked. The only way we will able to move to a new set of enforceable and meaningful greenhouse gas reduction commitments is to understand why past approaches have not worked.'- Lawrence Susskind, Harvard Law School, US'This is an enormously well-researched study that addresses an important hitherto-unanswered problem of negotiations. Usually single instances are analyzed but what about serial negotiations that return again and again to the subject, where the parties change position in their course? Downie tells us how this happens and in the process, enriches our understanding of negotiation. I enjoyed reading this book.'- I. William Zartman, The Johns Hopkins University, USThe Politics of Climate Change Negotiations describes the successes and failures of protracted international negotiations and most importantly, examines the lessons they hold for the future.Drawing on more than 100 interviews with climate change insiders, including former ministers, chief negotiators and presidential advisers, Christian Downie presents a rare inside account of why states agree to what they do and why they change their position in long negotiations. He also identifies eight strategies that others can use to influence the most powerful states in the world.This book will be invaluable to academics and students working in the fields of international relations, political science, negotiation studies and global environmental politics. It will be of equal value to diplomats, policymakers and various non-governmental organizations that seek to influence international negotiations.Contents: Part I: International Negotiations and Theoretical Background 1. Introduction 2. Histories and Theories of International Negotiations Part II: The Case Studies 3. Toward Berlin 1993 - 1995: Environmental Interests and a Tentative Agreement 4. From Berlin to Kyoto 1995 - 1997: Rising Opposition to Environmental Interests 5. From Kyoto to The Hague 1998 2000: Shifting Political Dynamics and a Question of Ratification Part III: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Implications 6. Discussion: The Behaviour of the US and the EU in the International Climate Change Negotiations 7. Toward an Understanding of Prolonged International Negotiations References

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An Exciting and Inspiring Collection of Vividly Told Stories of Christians Who Really Made A Difference. Half a Million of the Series Sold! Five Books in the Box Great for 9 – 14–year–olds Stories for Both Girls and Boys Box Sets Make an Excellent Gift for When a Single Book is Not Enough Look at everything around you – most things take time to happen. Who were the people who got some of these things started? What motivated and energised them to keep going? If you have ever been to Cornwall in England, you will have seen its beautiful beaches, quaint villages, and wild moors, but less obvious is its past tin mining industry. The miner’s life was rough one, and one of those men had a dramatic encounter with God which changed everything for him, and then also for those around him. What about an ordinary man who starts a mission to university students and ends up employing 19,000 staff in 190 countries, now reaching out to athletes, politicians and so many more. Then there is the evangelist who preached to 80 million people in 185 countries, was friends with world leaders and became a household name – can you guess who it is? If you have ever watched one of the many ‘Westerns’ featuring cowboys and Indians, they will have left out the work of reaching out to the many native American Indian tribes in the 1700s – now you can fill in the missing parts of the story. Lastly there is a teenage girl who while out with friends having fun, dives into a beautiful pond, only to hit a rock and end up paralysed from the neck down. For someone with no personal mobility, she has accomplished far more than most people who have it. Sometimes we need to reach out and stretch ourselves to try something new. You may not be the first, but then again, you just might be. You Will Meet… Billy Bray discovers true happiness in Jesus Christ and his legacy to the Cornish people included lively preaching, newly built chapels and true revivals. Billy was saved from the deepest pit. Bill Bright‘s story is a tale of a scruffy rancher’s son would head one of the biggest missions that the world had ever known – Campus Crusade. Read the story of a man who loved Jesus above all else. Billy Graham was sixteen when he first preached the gospel. He has now preached to over 80 million people in 185 countries. The message is timeless, full of hope and Christ centred. David Brainerd‘s life on the American frontier in the early 1700s was difficult. David Brainerd was one of the first missionaries to the various Indian tribes there – a risky situation to be in. Joni Eareckson Tada‘s story is not just about a tragic accident. It is about how God’s power transforms lives. Joni’s work today with thousands of disabled people is a miracle in itself. Extra Features Includes Timelines and Thinking Further Features Over 50 Other Brilliant Titles in the Series 6 Other Fabulous Box Sets Available Published in 14 Languages!

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Machine Learning: A Bayesian and Optimization Perspective, 2nd edition, gives a unified perspective on machine learning by covering both pillars of supervised learning, namely regression and classification. The book starts with the basics, including mean square, least squares and maximum likelihood methods, ridge regression, Bayesian decision theory classification, logistic regression, and decision trees. It then progresses to more recent techniques, covering sparse modelling methods, learning in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and support vector machines, Bayesian inference with a focus on the EM algorithm and its approximate inference variational versions, Monte Carlo methods, probabilistic graphical models focusing on Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models and particle filtering. Dimensionality reduction and latent variables modelling are also considered in depth. This palette of techniques concludes with an extended chapter on neural networks and deep learning architectures. The book also covers the fundamentals of statistical parameter estimation, Wiener and Kalman filtering, convexity and convex optimization, including a chapter on stochastic approximation and the gradient descent family of algorithms, presenting related online learning techniques as well as concepts and algorithmic versions for distributed optimization. Focusing on the physical reasoning behind the mathematics, without sacrificing rigor, all the various methods and techniques are explained in depth, supported by examples and problems, giving an invaluable resource to the student and researcher for understanding and applying machine learning concepts. Most of the chapters include typical case studies and computer exercises, both in MATLAB and Python. The chapters are written to be as self-contained as possible, making the text suitable for different courses: pattern recognition, statistical/adaptive signal processing, statistical/Bayesian learning, as well as courses on sparse modeling, deep learning, and probabilistic graphical models. New to this edition: Complete re-write of the chapter on Neural Networks and Deep Learning to reflect the latest advances since the 1st edition. The chapter, starting from the basic perceptron and feed-forward neural networks concepts, now presents an in depth treatment of deep networks, including recent optimization algorithms, batch normalization, regularization techniques such as the dropout method, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, attention mechanisms, adversarial examples and training, capsule networks and generative architectures, such as restricted Boltzman machines (RBMs), variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Expanded treatment of Bayesian learning to include nonparametric Bayesian methods, with a focus on the Chinese restaurant and the Indian buffet processes.

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The inevitable convergence of the Blockchain, AI and IoT (Veuger 2019) will be an impactful combination of security, interconnectivity and autonomy to revolutionize the way processes run. A combination of Blockchain, AI and IoT technologies that affect the potential of how businesses, industries and even economies operate will redefine them more than they do now. Some applications and concepts have already seen an overlap between these technologies with promising results. One example is the combination of AI and Blockchain to manage Unmanned Aerial/Air/Airborne Vehicle traffic, making mass autonomous flying safer. This application alone will redefine the business of aviation and logistics. The convergence of Blockchain, Ai and IoT can enable organizations to maximize the benefits of each of these technologies while minimizing the risks and constraints associated with them. Since IoT networks include a large number of connected devices, there are numerous vulnerabilities in the network that make the network vulnerable to hacker attacks, fraud, and theft. To prevent security problems, AI powered by machine learning can proactively defend against malware and hacker attacks. Network and data security can be further enhanced through a blockchain that can minimize illegal access to and alteration of data on the network. AI can also improve the functional capacity of the IoT network by making it more autonomous and smarter. For example, a proven convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT is Fujitsu's algorithm to measure employee heat stress levels. The algorithm continuously monitors workers' physiological data (temperature, humidity, activity levels, pulse rate, etc.) using portable In Vitro Diagnostic Devices (IDA) and sensors to track the correlation between various factors and workers' health. The analysis can help the organization to improve working conditions and prevent health problems of workers. Applying Blockchain to this system can help maintain more personalized data by ensuring privacy or help pay health insurance amounts through smart contracts. The expected impact of the convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT is not (yet) foreseeable and existing applications are not (yet) perfect. Many organizations, and especially early adopters, are high opinionated about the value of cognitive technologies and therefore invest in them. Findings of applications are now (still) at an early stage and are not yet as advanced as is necessary to achieve real transformation, as well as that business models also determine this. The same can be said of the IoT and Blockchain. With increased interest, investment and innovation, the convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT will become a reality.

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Determination of the exergy of biomass is the first step to evaluate and study the fuel characteristics, transfer processes and utilization systems of biomass from exergy aspect. This book aims to present up-to-date research on the exergy of biomass. Chapter 1 (Resources and Advantages of Biomass) mainly introduces the definition and classification of biomass as well as the resources and advantages of biomass. Chapter 2 (Equations for Estimating the Exergy of Biomass) mainly presents the various equations proposed or developed to estimate the exergy of biomass and these include the simple, complicated and developed equations. Chapter 3 (Analysis of the Exergy of Biomass) mainly defines the basic knowledge for the exergy characteristics (moisture related exergy, ash related exergy, S related exergy, LHV related exergy and total exergy) and distribution (percentages of moisture related exergy, ash related exergy, S related exergy and LHV related exergy) of biomass. Chapter 4 (Exergy of Woody Biomass) mainly presents the basic properties of woody biomass (i.e., moisture content, ash content, ash compositions, elemental compositions and heating values) as well as the exergy characteristics and distribution of woody biomass. HHV related relationship, LHV related relationship and ash related relationships are also proposed to estimate the exergy of woody biomass. Chapter 5 (Exergy of Rice Husk) mainly presents the basic properties of rice husk (i.e., moisture content, ash content, ash compositions, elemental compositions and heating values) as well as the exergy characteristics and distribution of rice husk. HHV related relationship and LHV related relationship are then proposed to estimate the exergy of rice husk. Chapter 6 (Exergy of Rice Straw) mainly presents the basic properties of rice straw (i.e., moisture content, ash content, ash compositions, elemental compositions and heating values) as well as the exergy characteristics and distribution of rice straw. HHV related relationship and LHV related relationship are then proposed to estimate the exergy of rice straw. Chapter 7 (Exergy of Cereal Straw) mainly presents the basic properties of cereal straw (i.e., moisture content, ash content, ash compositions, elemental compositions, and heating values) as well as the exergy characteristics and distribution of cereal straw. HHV related relationship and LHV related relationship are then proposed to estimate the exergy of cereal straw. Hopefully, the content of this book can supply a good guide to the up-to-date research on the exergy of biomass.

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Loos with incredible views, lavish lavatories, outstanding outhouses - all are featured in this pictorial guide to the world's most stunning toilets. Whether they're high-tech or arty, amusing or amazing, each toilet has a photo and a description of its location. More than 100 restrooms to remember are featured, from Antarctica to Zambia. As any experienced traveller knows, you can tell a whole lot about a place by its bathrooms. Whatever you prefer to call them - lavatory, loo, bog, khasi, thunderbox, dunny, bathroom, restroom, washroom or water closet - toilets are a (sometimes opaque, often wide-open) window into the secret soul of a destination. It's not just how well they're looked after that's revealing, but where they are positioned and the way they've been conceptualised, designed and decorated. Toilets so often transcend their primary function of being a convenience to become a work of art in their own right, or to make a cultural statement about the priorities, traditions and values of the venues, locations and communities they serve. The lavatory is a great leveller - everyone feels the call of nature, every day - but being ubiquitous doesn't make it uniform. Around the planet (and beyond it, see page 12), toilets have followed various evolutionary pathways to best suit their environment. In these pages you'll find porcelain pews with fantastic views, audacious attention-seeking urban outhouses, and eco-thrones made from sticks and stones in all sorts of wild settings, from precipitous mountain peaks to dusty deserts. So, wherever you're reading this, we hope you're sitting comfortably. About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)

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A better development and implementation framework for credit risk scorecards Intelligent Credit Scoring presents a business-oriented process for the development and implementation of risk prediction scorecards. The credit scorecard is a powerful tool for measuring the risk of individual borrowers, gauging overall risk exposure and developing analytically driven, risk-adjusted strategies for existing customers. In the past 10 years, hundreds of banks worldwide have brought the process of developing credit scoring models in-house, while ‘credit scores' have become a frequent topic of conversation in many countries where bureau scores are used broadly. In the United States, the ‘FICO' and ‘Vantage' scores continue to be discussed by borrowers hoping to get a better deal from the banks. While knowledge of the statistical processes around building credit scorecards is common, the business context and intelligence that allows you to build better, more robust, and ultimately more intelligent, scorecards is not. As the follow-up to Credit Risk Scorecards, this updated second edition includes new detailed examples, new real-world stories, new diagrams, deeper discussion on topics including WOE curves, the latest trends that expand scorecard functionality and new in-depth analyses in every chapter. Expanded coverage includes new chapters on defining infrastructure for in-house credit scoring, validation, governance, and Big Data. Black box scorecard development by isolated teams has resulted in statistically valid, but operationally unacceptable models at times. This book shows you how various personas in a financial institution can work together to create more intelligent scorecards, to avoid disasters, and facilitate better decision making. Key items discussed include: Following a clear step by step framework for development, implementation, and beyond Lots of real life tips and hints on how to detect and fix data issues How to realise bigger ROI from credit scoring using internal resources Explore new trends and advances to get more out of the scorecard Credit scoring is now a very common tool used by banks, Telcos, and others around the world for loan origination, decisioning, credit limit management, collections management, cross selling, and many other decisions. Intelligent Credit Scoring helps you organise resources, streamline processes, and build more intelligent scorecards that will help achieve better results.

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